Since radar was first developed it has been standard practice to deploy chaff as a countermeasure. Chaff serves either to obscure the radar beam and prevent detection of a target beyond the chaff or to deceive the user of the radar into believing there to be a target at the point at which the chaff is deployed. Over the course of time various means of deploying chaff have been developed. One widely used method involves packing the chaff tightly within the cylindrical body of a missile which carries the chaff to the point at which it is dispersed.
As radar systems have increased in discrimination so more sophisticated countermeasures have been found necessary. In particular it has been proposed to use structures such as trihedral re-entrant corner reflectors to produce a radar reflection with precisely determined characteristics. It has been proposed that such structures are associated with aircraft, ships and ground installations. It would be desirable however to be able to deploy these structures in the manner of chaff, independent of any vehicle or installation. It is not however practical to deploy these structures within missiles of the type normally used for the deployment of chaff. Although the reflector structures are commonly designed to fold flat and hence occupy a relatively small volume they still remain of far too great a size to fit within the body of a conventional chaff carrying missile. Replacing conventional deployment systems with a dedicated system using missiles with a body of sufficiently great a diameter to enclose the reflector structure would be prohibitively expensive.